posted at 9:21 am on June 23, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

The coincidences just keep on a-rolling in the IRS targeting scandal. It turns out that the IRS didn’t just pay some low-level schlep to recycle backup server tapes on a six-month basis to maintain their e-mail records. They paid an outside firm, Sonasoft, to archive that data for long-term retrieval — or at least they did. That contract got canceled just weeks after Lois Lerner’s hard-drive failure, the Daily Caller learned:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

Oddly, this doesn’t appear to have come up in testimony from officials at the IRS. John Koskinen’s opening statement at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing of how hard the IRS worked to retrieve that data didn’t include any effort to restore a Sonasoft backup from the servers, or mention any outside contractor at all. The existence of this contract appears to have been a better-kept secret than NSA snooping through Internet service providers.

Perhaps the contractor’s relationship with the IRS and Koskinen’s slow fan-dance of transparency will come up in this week’s hearings on the IRS scandal. Koskinen has House Oversight Committee appearances scheduled for tonight and tomorrow, and Darrell Issa gave the IRS Commissioner more than 50 questions to answer. And in the #5 position, Issa wants specifics about outside contractors:

5. Please identify all vendors and outside contractors used by the IRS for the following purposes:

The White House rejected calls on Friday for a special prosecutor to look into lost IRS emails and the inappropriate targeting of conservative groups, saying Republican investigations have failed to find a smoking gun.

Both the Internal Revenue Service and the administration have already demonstrated “extensive cooperation” with Republicans in Congress, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, adding there have been 750,000 pages of documents provided, as well as 64,000 e-mails from then-IRS division chief Lois Lerner.

“Our willingness to cooperate with this investigation is evident from the numbers,” Earnest said, charging that a “a large number of claims and conspiracy theories that have been floated about this process by Republicans just have not panned out, frankly.”

Earnest also said that there’s “zero evidence” to show malfeasance, which is a handy way of saying that all of the hard drives at the IRS have been destroyed. I wonder if that’s also true at Sonasoft.

Whatever Sonasoft’s obligations after the contract was terminated, it’s clear that the company had a relevant contractual obligation to the IRS at the time of the supposed email loss. There seems to be no question that Sonasoft’s knowledge of the email “catastrophe” needs to be investigated.

But there’s more to this drama – and it’s (go figure) political. Sonasoft is a small company, founded and run in Silicon Valley by a Mr. Nand (Andy) Khanna. It isn’t clear whether Andy Khanna is any relation to Rohit (Ro) Khanna, a Pennsylvania-born attorney who served as an Obama appointee in the U.S. Department of Commerce, and is now a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives in the 17th district of California (in Silicon Valley). But what is clear is that the two other members of Sonasoft’s board of directors – the members other than Andy Khanna – are both working hard to get Ro Khanna elected.

Here are the players. On the Sonasoft board of directors, Dr. Romesh K. Japra, M.D., is the chairman of the board. The board director is Mr. Romi Randhawa, whose day job is president and CEO of HPM Networks, another Silicon Valley IT company.

And then there’s Ro Khanna. Khanna has connections to Obama that go way back, to Obama’s first run for the Illinois state senate, when Khanna was at the University of Chicago as an undergrad. Will Burns, a Chicago Democratic political operative, recruited Khanna to walk precincts with Obama during the campaign, and Khanna was reportedly star-struck …

Be sure to read the rest, as it’s too lengthy and complicated to excerpt.

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The White House rejected calls on Friday for a special prosecutor to look into lost IRS emails and the inappropriate targeting of conservative groups, saying Republican investigations have failed to find a smoking gun.

Kinda hard to find a smoking gun when you’re claiming thousands of e-mails have been “lost”.

Presuming we are looking for evidence of coordination with the White House to target Conservative groups, wouldn’t there also be a record on the other end, at the White House?

Look, as sure as Gitmo is closed and I kept my plan, there isn’t even a smidgen of corruption here. I know because the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy was on tv and said so.

Since they canceled the backup service weeks after the hard drive crash, that means the backup service has an archive from before the service was canceled. Has anyone asked this company for it yet?

paulsur on June 23, 2014 at 9:24 AM

This is what is going to be interesting. Okay, so they cancelled the contract. This doesn’t mean every email they ever backed up got deleted automatically. Either they are still stored with them (probably not), or they were moved to either a different vendor or backups were sent to the IRS.

Sonasoft, which I’m sure were aware of Federal laws, would never delete them on their own. Never.

Since they canceled the backup service weeks after the hard drive crash, that means the backup service has an archive from before the service was canceled. Has anyone asked this company for it yet?

paulsur on June 23, 2014 at 9:24 AM

I suppose it’s worth a shot, but they obviously cancelled the service precisely because they could then destroy the backup tapes and not produce any more. So that’s probably not going to produce anything.

What might produce something is throwing Lois Lerner, et al, in jail for not performing the required backups. I figure if 90%+ of IRS employees are rotting in jail, our country will take a turn for the better.

Just another incredibly convenient coincidence, just like how the 6 other IRS employees being investigated mysteriously had their hard drives destroyed as well within that time frame. And the IRS just thought to mention this to investigators…last week. Even though they said they had ‘complied’ with all information requests from the outset and WE’RE NOT SORRY SO SHUT UP WINGNUTS and the like.

I suppose it’s worth a shot, but they obviously cancelled the service precisely because they could then destroy the backup tapes and not produce any more. So that’s probably not going to produce anything.

What might produce something is throwing Lois Lerner, et al, in jail for not performing the required backups. I figure if 90%+ of IRS employees are rotting in jail, our country will take a turn for the better.

Fenris on June 23, 2014 at 9:38 AM

But if they cancelled the service after the hard drive crash, there should be a backup at Sonasoft. Frankly, there should be lots of places where these e-mails are backed up, but that’s a separate matter. Point is, if Sonasoft comes forward and says they conveniently have no backup of these e-mails, there’s obviously a massive coverup operation underway to destroy any record of their existence.

Oddly, this doesn’t appear to have come up in testimony from officials at the IRS. John Koskinen’s opening statement at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing of how hard the IRS worked to retrieve that data

How many lies of commission and omission does it take before we get a prosecutor? These criminals must be locked up.

But if they cancelled the service after the hard drive crash, there should be a backup at Sonasoft. Frankly, there should be lots of places where these e-mails are backed up, but that’s a separate matter. Point is, if Sonasoft comes forward and says they conveniently have no backup of these e-mails, there’s obviously a massive coverup operation underway to destroy any record of their existence.

You people are truly impossible to please. Due to Republicans refusing to pass a few miniscule budget increases, many government employees have been forced to use antiquated computer systems, so it’s no surprise multiple computers all crashed.

…and then, when frugal employees at the IRS, trying to be responsible with taxpayer money decide to trim noncritical expenses, such as back-up data (which can annually run well into four figures), you people see yet another conspiracy.

…there’s obviously a massive coverup operation underway to destroy any record of their existence.

Doughboy on June 23, 2014 at 9:44 AM

That much is already obvious to all but the most blindly partisan lefties. Which is why I think all backups the apparatchiks could find are already destroyed. So that leaves only the possible backups being those they overlooked and escaped deletion.

But if they cancelled the service after the hard drive crash, there should be a backup at Sonasoft. Frankly, there should be lots of places where these e-mails are backed up, but that’s a separate matter. Point is, if Sonasoft comes forward and says they conveniently have no backup of these e-mails, there’s obviously a massive coverup operation underway to destroy any record of their existence.

Doughboy on June 23, 2014 at 9:44 AM

Whether they Sonasoft gave the backups back to the IRS or not, Sonasoft should be able to disprove the claim that the backups were only kept for 6 months and then destroyed. As a contractor, Sonasoft would have been extremely careful to comply with federal regulations. They certainly wouldn’t have destroyed any backups themselves. And they’re going to have their own policies, procedures and rules for dealing with the IRS contract somewhere.

If the Repubs are smart, they’re subpoenaing Sonasoft officials and demanding all records and contracts related to the IRS right now.

You people are truly impossible to please. Due to Republicans refusing to pass a few miniscule budget increases, many government employees have been forced to use antiquated computer systems, so it’s no surprise multiple computers all crashed.

…and then, when frugal employees at the IRS, trying to be responsible with taxpayer money decide to trim noncritical expenses, such as back-up data (which can annually run well into four figures), you people see yet another conspiracy.

…and then, when frugal employees at the IRS, trying to be responsible with taxpayer money decide to trim noncritical expenses, such as back-up data (which can annually run well into four figures), you people see yet another conspiracy.

Frank Lib on June 23, 2014 at 9:51 AM

I know! And just wait until Madame President Hillary is in charge, the government will be dead broke and won’t be able to do anything at all! Except for, maybe, hiring more bureaucrats. Only with more government employees can society accomplish anything of value.

But if they no longer have a contract, they wouldn’t be keeping them either. Back to the IRS they go.

Fenris on June 23, 2014 at 9:41 AM

Agreed, they go back to IRS but they’re not part of the “routine” back-up tapes they use on a daily basis. They were probably a different form of media (Hard drives vs backup tapes). So the data should be there.

But I know where this going: The IRS is going to claim that the backup data was put back on the Exchange Servers, which were then subject to the normal tape back ups which were, of course, deleted after six months.

Of course, it would have taken a much bigger effort to get them incorporated back in to Exchange so they could be deleted instead of just letting the back-ups just sit there. Oh, and if they did reload the emails, what became of that backup hard drive? Did that mysteriously crash as well?

The emails are public records which must be kept according to law. They must also be maintained according to IRS rules.

So even if the contract was cancelled that isn’t an excuse to destroy records.

gwelf on June 23, 2014 at 9:54 AM

That’s kind of the point; throw them in jail. Throw them in jail now. Don’t wait until Obama’s final days in office when he’ll issue blanket pardons for crimes nobody’s even been charged with (as if that’s even legal itself?). The opposition party should be raising holy helll about this, and demanding investigations and prosecutors and making a huge campaign issue out of it. And other scandals too, for that matter.

… there isn’t even a smidgen of corruption here. I know because the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy was on tv and said so.
trubble on June 23, 2014 at 9:32 AM

And the crease of his pants. Don’t forget that wonderful crease.
Says Presidential.

I would hope the House committees already are developing follow-up questions to Andy Khanna. If Sonasoft main business qualification is their owners’ donations and ties to progressive politicians and groups, I would expect Andy will prefer to tell the House committee that Sonasoft never archived Lerner’s emails rather than become the Alexander Butterfield of the IRS investigation.

The committee needs to expect Khanna to be as uncooperative with them as Lerner and Koskinen have been and be prepared to grill him on the details of why Sonasoft didn’t have a back-up to send to the IRS on the date Lerner’s hard drive crashed, rather than stupidly acting amazed and nonplussed that he’s willing to trash his own company’s competence to support the politicians who in the past have given Sonasoft sweetheart contracts (along with The New York Times, who it’s safe to assume would be off finding another email archiver quickly if Andy or any of the other execs started blowing holes in the IRS’s dog-ate-my-homework story).

Whether they Sonasoft gave the backups back to the IRS or not, Sonasoft should be able to disprove the claim that the backups were only kept for 6 months and then destroyed. As a contractor, Sonasoft would have been extremely careful to comply with federal regulations. They certainly wouldn’t have destroyed any backups themselves. And they’re going to have their own policies, procedures and rules for dealing with the IRS contract somewhere.

PetecminMd on June 23, 2014 at 9:53 AM

I don’t know how cooperative Sonasoft will be. This is a ruthless regime we’re dealing with. Look at how they treat whistleblowers. If it means covering their own asses, there is no length to which they won’t go. Ultimately this is gonna require someone either at the IRS, elsewhere in the government, or at an outside group like Sonasoft having the stones to come forward and literally risk their life to expose the truth.

That’s kind of the point; throw them in jail. Throw them in jail now. Don’t wait until Obama’s final days in office when he’ll issue blanket pardons for crimes nobody’s even been charged with (as if that’s even legal itself?). The opposition party should be raising holy helll about this, and demanding investigations and prosecutors and making a huge campaign issue out of it. And other scandals too, for that matter.

But we don’t have an opposition party.

Fenris on June 23, 2014 at 10:00 AM

I agree.

It’s never been more obvious that we don’t have a “civil service” but criminal enterprises and cartels set up in bureaucracies – a new aristocracy that isn’t beholden to the rule of law or answerable to the people.

So what you are saying is that the contract was political payback and we can’t expect any help from these jokers on what happened to the emails in question. Oh and from the names, I’d say it’s a safe bet that none of their families came over on the Mayflower. The best hope is the character trying to get into politics, he is probably the only one with anything to lose. And probably has so much money that he might wait for the next generation.

Both the Internal Revenue Service and the administration have already demonstrated “extensive cooperation” with Republicans in Congress, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, adding there have been 750,000 pages of documents provided, as well as 64,000 e-mails from then-IRS division chief Lois Lerner.

Except of course for 2 years of Lerner’s emails in the time period of the most interest. And the emails of 5 other “public servants” who were involved in targeting conservatives.

And Lerner’s hard drive “failed” 10 days after a request for the information was made as this scandal was breaking out. What an amazing coincidence.

SonaVault Email Archiving gives us the peace of mind knowing that our email is securely archived, searchable and compressed in a way so it does not hog valuable disk space. Having the ability to quickly find emails even if the users have deleted them is a major comfort

It’s never been more obvious that we don’t have a “civil service” but criminal enterprises and cartels set up in bureaucracies – a new aristocracy that isn’t beholden to the rule of law or answerable to the people.

gwelf on June 23, 2014 at 10:07 AM

It should be obvious, unfortunately we have too many Gimmiecrats who don’t realize that the bloodsucking weasels just make their life worse in the long run.

As a contractor, Sonasoft would have been extremely careful to comply with federal regulations.

Exactly, it bears repeating. Either the data is retrievable, even if you have to pull teeth to get it, or federal laws were broken and everyone involved is going to jail. And if neither of these avenues are pursued vigorously and truthfully, then our democratic system is a sham, and it’s time for Plan B.

Our email archiving software, SonaVault, can archive multiple copies of the emails, one copy is stored in Microsoft SQL Server and the second copy is stored in a daily folder on the file system which can be easily copied to the write once read many (WORM) drive to meet government regulations like Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), Federal Information Security Act (FISMA), Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Basel II, SEC requirements, and other compliance requirements.

The coincidences just keep on a-rolling in the IRS targeting scandal.
- Ed

But this shows that it isn’t ‘coincidences’ that keep rolling along. This latest bit is just an excellent example on how just about anything can be spun into supportive evidence for a conspiracy theory that is is otherwise merit-less.
And what I love about this one is that after some have dug even deeper in to the depth that they’ve been digging…they get to a possible relation of someone on the board who has a connection to Obama…going all the way back to when he was an undergrad.
Clues!
You guys needle me for ‘refusing’ to see what’s ‘plain as day’.
But not once – never – has anything greater that weak circumstantial ‘evidence’ been shown…along with angry rhetorical questions from Repubs. They don’t even let the witnesses they’ve called answer these questions when they come before them. The Dems have to turn all their time over for that little bit of a hearing process to occur.

Seriously, how desperate is the theorizing going to get her?
I think what folks need to do is figure out where Kevin Bacon comes in.
He’s the smoking gun.

Looks like Sonasoft was hired during Bush, so I’m sure they are legit.

Buddahpundit on June 23, 2014 at 10:13 AM

Pay attention everybody. This is what a master troll looks like. Just plausible enough that you’re not sure he’s being sarcastic, but in reality condemning Bush with the same big government brush as Obama. And rightly so; ‘compassionate conservatism’ was just a soporific phrase intended to deceive conservatives into supporting socialism.

As an American, I DO NOT care how many emails have already been given to Congress. I want them ALL to be given to Congress. Congress has oversight of the Executive branch!! What the hell is the problem Levin or IRS. Open all the doors and let America see for themselves that there is no cover-up. Quit dragging your feet!

most likely the company itself would never had the emails, they install and support self hosted archiving software. all backups would have still been on irs control.
I was actually looking at them few weeks back to replace outdated gfi mailarchiver I run here.

You’ve been hiding your head in the sand from the very beginning on this whole thing.

First off several crimes have been committed. The civil rights of some of these groups were violated. Also, some of their documents were handed over to lefty groups by the IRS – which is also a crime.

And the loss of these public documents is also a federal crime.

In the beginning Obama came out as outrageously outraged and promised to hold people accountable. But now there’s not a smidge of corruption. Ok, maybe you can tell us what investigation Obama conducted to come to this conclusion and who’s being held responsible and being punished for the CRIMES that were committed?

They also started out saying the illegal targeting was confined to the Cincinnati office. That’s long been shown false. It was all directed from DC.

Next it was claimed that lefty groups were also targeted. Also shown to be a lie.

Time and again IRS officials have lied to Congress, obfuscated and weaseled their way out of answering questions accurately and being transparent.

And now we learn that primary documents in the time in question on 6 hard drives are gone? And that – contrary to federal law and IRS rules – no backups exist either?

The least lefties like you could do is actually place some value on bureaucratic transparency and accountability. But you don’t. We all know you’re fascists now. You want a powerful government filled with “public servants” but you don’t want any corruption dealt with or looked in to.

SonaVault uses Microsoft’s Journaling mechanism to extract and archive messages. This ensures that every message which goes out and enters an Microsoft Exchange Archiving Server is archived even if the message is deleted by the user from his or her mailbox.

Ok, if the IRS audits you for the year 2009 – 2011 why don’t you tell them you lost all your records for those years. Your hard drive failed. But you can give them any record they want before or after that time period. See what happens.

Now, in fairness, I have some clients who forget things when they come into my office and cannot pull up their email from our computers but it’s a lead pipe cinch that she could pull them up from within the the system. Oh and by the way, when she noticed there was a problem on her computer, pulling them up on a computer inside the system and archiving them would have been her first step.

So if this firm broke the law and got rid of emails and if IRS workers were also breaking the law by not archiving records they should be prosecuted right?
What’s the legal scenario where Lois Lerner and those 5 other IRS execs made sure their emails were not archived and were only on their local hard drives which ALL happened to fail. 10 days after requests for information were made.

You understand that if you emailed me or I emailed you – and then I deleted those emails…you still have the copies.
So if Lerner or the IRS or Obama or Michael Moore intentionally and conspiratorially deleted these emails with a view towards hiding or erasing some incriminating conversations, then they are very inept at being devious and deceptive.

You people are truly impossible to please. Due to Republicans refusing to pass a few miniscule budget increases, many government employees have been forced to use antiquated computer systems, so it’s no surprise multiple computers all crashed.

…and then, when frugal employees at the IRS, trying to be responsible with taxpayer money decide to trim noncritical expenses, such as back-up data (which can annually run well into four figures), you people see yet another conspiracy.

Frank Lib on June 23, 2014 at 9:51 AM

Those incredibly hard working civil servants at the IRS are truly stewards of the taxpayer’s money for sure. They needed to exercise frugality in order to purchase all those tactical weapons and hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow-point ammunition to protect Americans and their money from…the government? Otherwise, it’s intellectually dishonest to believe that the 7 people involved in a potentially criminal investigation of their behavior just coincidentally had their machines fail and were just being good employees by having the hardware disposed of.

You are either ignorant or completely dishonest. Actually, you are both.

Yes, it is perfectly legitimate that the computer crashed as exactly the right moment to lose all her emails. Completely innocent that happened.

Also, 100% unlikely.

In civil litigation, such an excuse would never, ever fly. That you think it is completely acceptable of your gov’t, when the evidence shows that gov’t was being used illegally and to harass political opponents, is disturbing.

this, like much else, is one of those things that an honest liberal would be just as outraged as any conservative over. Just because we disagree on philosophy (i.e., whether or not we are slaves of the state or free people), we should all be concerned about gov’t corruption and abuse of power.

But, you are not honest in any sense of the word, are you?

You simply don’t care what “your side” does as long as it furthers the agenda. Which is, indeed, fascist. You are nothing more than a brown shirt.

You believe you are intelligent and morally superior, yet you are completely dishonest about everything, and willing to allow ANY conduct as long as it furthers your cause. How you believe yourself to be anything other than a thug is odd.